As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) press ahead with their attack on the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip irrespective of the mounting civilian death toll, Israel's “intent to genocide Palestinians is very clear,” Eva Bartlett, an independent writer and journalist, told Sputnik.
“They're being annihilated. Israel literally wants to push them into the sea and out of Gaza,” said the writer.
"If it had not been after October 7, it would have happened at another occasion," she added.
Bartlett, who was in the West Bank in 2007 as an activist, witnessed, as she described it, the “hellish reality that Palestinians endure every single day under Israeli occupation.”
Bartlett also pointed to what she called the "bombasticness" of Israel, saying that Israeli leadership and military spokespeople "love to say things like ‘bomb,’ or usually ‘bomb Gaza to the Stone Age,’ ‘destroy Gaza,’ ‘flatten Gaza,’" etc.
“What we're seeing now, this genocide in Gaza, is by far the worst that Israel has committed since it took its illegal colonists out of Gaza in around 2005. But it has committed massacres in Gaza every few years. I was there during the 2009 and 2012 massacres, which were horrific,” Bartlett emphasized, adding that now “it's like Israeli massacres on steroids.”
Israel’s bombing and ground invasion has killed over 11,000 people since October 7, with close to 40 percent of them children, according to the enclave’s health authorities.
Incidentally, going back to the surprise attack launched by the militant group, Eva Bartlett urged “a little bit more skepticism over the Israeli narrative on how many people were killed by Hamas.” She pointed to the reports of emerging videos and testimonies that “point the finger at Israeli forces being a responsible for a significant portion of those dead.”
At the moment, “we need concrete actions to stop Israel's genocide,” Bartlett insisted.
As Israel's war on Hamas intensifies, pro-Palestinian protests have rippled around the world. Massive demonstrations have taken place in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, and Ankara, all calling for a ceasefire as the civilian death toll in Gaza grows.
The Biden administration unilaterally blocked calls by dozens of countries at the UN to institute a ceasefire in Gaza last month. However, since then, demands for a ceasefire have become more vociferous. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk recently emphasized the urgent need to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“You have even like the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issuing a statement saying we think that war crimes are being committed in Gaza. Well, of course they're being committed in Gaza... But… all this talk of some sort of political solution, that's for later, …right now, we need to be concentrating on what Israel is doing in Gaza, also in the West Bank,” the journalist said.
A joint Arab-Islamic summit on November 11 urged the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to investigate “war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel against Palestinians." Leaders and representatives of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had gathered for an emergency joint Arab-Islamic summit held in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. In its communique, those gathered dismissed attempts by Israel, or its supporters like the United States, to describe the retaliatory war being waged in Gaza as “self-defense or justifying it under any pretext.”
The summit’s participants also urged all countries to “stop exporting weapons and ammunitions” being used by Israel to “kill the Palestinian people and destroy their homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and all their properties.”
As for mainstream Western publications, “They want people to see this as a war between Israel and Hamas, and it is not,” Eva Bartlett said.
Generally, “Western analyzes tend to overlook intentionally the reason Palestinians are willing to sacrifice lives, the reason Palestinians are needing to resist, and they never give that context,” she added.
“Hamas are portrayed as brutes or terrorist who are sacrificing their own people. If you see the images and the footage coming out of Gaza, you will see many times people saying, 'We stand with the resistance. We want them to continue,' which is a testament to the hell they've been enduring in Gaza.”
Eva Bartlett acknowledged that she had nothing but a general cynicism towards international bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC), because they're “always basically working on the side of NATO or Israel or whichever belligerent entity is waging destruction… And they're also used as tools against, for example, Russia or in this case, resistance.”
However, she said, “I have to insist on the urgency for international bodies or individual countries to be courageous enough to deliver humanitarian aid into Gaza, it's desperately needed. People are starving. They don't have potable water. They do not have medicines, they do not have anesthesia. They do not have electricity for the hospitals to function. That is what we need to prioritize right now. Later, you can talk about international solutions."
“Right now, people need to consider just how drastic and dramatic Israel's genocide of Gaza is," Eva Bartlett reiterated.